Prospects of suborbital space tourism from the rollout of second SpaceShipTwo and development of Lynx Mark II and New Shepard

摘要

Although the realization of suborbital space tourism (SST) has been long overdue, there are some exciting news happened recently. On 19 June 2016 and within 14 months, the Blue Origin completed 4 successful full-scale test flights for the New Shepard system with the same reused booster. Fourteen months after the crash of first SpaceShipTwo (SS2), Virgin Galactic unveiled its second SS2 Unity on 19 February 2016. And the XCOR keeps on its development of Lynx Mark II. On 15 January 2016, NASA announced the Commercial Resupply Services (CRS-2) contracts which were not designed for SST but could indirectly promote or affect its development. NASA has selected 12 experiments for the first commercial research flight of SS2 on 3 June 2014, and selected XCOR Aerospace in 2011 to provide suborbital flight and payload integration services for research and scientific missions. All of these evidences showed the advantageous facets to the prospects of SST development. However, from the fact that the first SS2 named VSS Enterprise was rolled out on 7 December 2009 and did not reach commercial SST operations before the crash on 31 October 2014, we just cannot be too optimistic. It seems that there is no enough momentum from the private industry. A favorable expectation for the realization of private commercial SST could not be earlier than 2020.